Roddy Lumsden Reviews "Last Chance To Eat"

A few years back, I lived in Stoke Newington, a colourful area of North London which became unexpectedly with-it, and expensive. It attracted the semi-famous: writers, indie musicians and stand-up comedians. The area grew bigger - not because of an influx of trendy sorts, but because estate agents started to redefine boundaries, and great chunks of less salubrious neighbouring areas began to be inched into Stoke Newington.

I was reminded of this by the bass – the fish that is. In Last Chance To Eat, the food writer Gina Mallet explains that, due to the recent foodie fondness for the bass (and no doubt its ripe restaurant price), the term bass is now applied to many fish which were hereto otherly named: the chewy sounding Patagonian toothfish is now to be had at spangly restaurants in the form of the Antarctic sea bass.

Mallet's book, which looks at changes in the food industry over five lengthy chapters (eggs, cheese, meat, veg and fish), has just been re-issued in paperback by Mainstream, following its great critical success since it first appeared in Canada in 2004. Two pages of review clippings at the start are tesimony to how enjoyable and thought-provoking a book this is.

Ostensibly, Last Chance To Eat is a piece of polemical non-fiction. It's not just that though, and it is the unusual nature of the book's format – part memoir, part social history, part cookbook - which makes it such a good read. You can imagine a fussy UK editor advising against this, chopping one or more of these strands, lest it offend imagined conventions.

And Mallet is a fantastic writer – by turns plain-spoken and poetic, with a resigned tone touched with dry humour. She is also convincing, not least because she appears fairly neutral in the malestrom that is the politics of food: just as willing to take a swipe at environmentalists (for shunning industry-funded studies while applying the same when it suits) as corporate nasties such as American processed cheese giants who are happy to use scare tactics to kill off traditional cheeses.

Talking of cheese, this book offers an explanation as to why my father won't touch the stuff. The Great War had killed off a great many cheesemakers – it would be many decades before the craft recovered, and many types were forever lost. When WWII came about, cheese was seen as a luxury, and most milk was used in other ways. A foul substance called National Cheese (often nicknamed 'mousetrap') was often the only cheese available and Mallet, a child at the time, describes it as resembling 'the clippings cut from yellow toenails'.

Another wartime food shift saw a brief trend for horse eating in the UK. Mallet's mother used to shop weekly at a Soho butcher with long queues and a plentiful meat supply. One day, when her father went along, he spotted a tiny sign on the window – Chevaline – which explained the matter. The eating of horse (higher protein, less fat than beef) rose to another recent peak in Europe thanks to BSE. Mallet relates being offered a strange dish at a well-to-do Toronto restaurant recently: if you know that Surf and Turf relates to a steak with a side of prawns, you can work out for yourself what Quack and Track might be!

Last Chance To Eat is laced through with food-related memories of growing up in rural England in the post-war period. These, and a good dose of anecdote and trivia, skilfully balance the more scientific and political issues covered here: the trials of the hard-done-by egg industry, the fishing wars, the mass of (mis)information which turns out be the guesswork of scientists, often caught between governments and big business and not always playing fair.